Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks

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This book enshrines Faulks’s recent four-part BBC Two series. He starts by
explaining what he is about. Academic literary theory has disappeared up its
own signal-to-noise ratio, and popular “biographical reductionism” — the
idea that knowing about an author’s personal life is the necessary key to
understanding his or her books — is equally useless. Faulks is fed up with
this “based on” criticism and proposes instead to treat his 28 characters as
real people.

It sounds like a good idea, but it is not easy to do, as Faulks clearly
discovered. To talk about his chosen characters he has to put